Personalization at Scale • AI Gets Right Message to Right User for 62% CVR Boost

Headspace, a leading provider of digital resources for mental health and wellness, is on a mission to guide consumers to more joy, less stress and better sleep. But with no one-size-fits-all solution and countless use cases for Headspace’s offerings, it can be challenging to get the right resources and right messages to the right consumers at scale. Heading into their busiest season—the holidays—we turned to generative AI to power a new ad campaign designed to be as personalized as possible.

The process began with gaining a deeper understanding of the prospective consumers. Using Persona.Flow, we gathered consumer research insights about the seasonal stressors that impacted the target audience’s mental health during the holidays—a process completed in a matter of minutes rather than the days or weeks required by a traditional research program. This efficiency enabled us to get past the monolith of a single persona and dig into the nuances of multiple consumer profiles to springboard creative concepts that could be adapted for everyone.

We developed a modular ad concept that could pair seasonal emotional challenges with specific types of resources available from Headspace. Using Monks.Flow, our AI suite of tools, we combined ad elements—AI-generated backgrounds, product interface imagery and branded illustrations and iconography—to produce hundreds of assets at scale. For static and motion versions in multiple aspect ratios, production hours would have quickly racked up in a traditional design process. With AI-powered image generation and production, we had assets for 20 distinct use cases ready for approval quickly, and overall cut production time by two-thirds.

The ads were designed for Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, the machine learning-powered product to deliver ads to the right users. By combining AI creative and ad delivery, we created a highly relevant experience for the users, leading to higher-quality site traffic. North American users who saw the AI-assisted holiday assets through Advantage+ converted to a signup at a 62% higher rate than Headspace’s other Advantage+ traffic.

Initially, the AI assets started out with a lower CTR than traditional ads while the learning phase was in progress. However, we improved performance by providing a larger round of AI-assisted creatives for the New Year—and the improvement was clear. With more data to work with, the algorithm could successfully narrow the CTR gap between the test and control campaigns. The AI-assisted campaigns became even more efficient, driving over 10% more conversions at a 13% better cost-per-signup compared to the control campaign.

With over 460 original ad assets designed from scratch for personalized testing, we helped Headspace work smarter, not harder, using generative AI. By combining multiple tools—from our proprietary Monks.Flow and Firefly generative technology from Adobe—with the expertise to steer the ad delivery algorithms by feeding campaigns the right asset fuel, Headspace is able to get even more people access to mental health resources, helping them lead more stress-free, joyful lives.